African American Studies

Department of African American Studies

The African American Studies Department examines, from numerous disciplinary perspectives, the experiences of people of African descent in Black Atlantic societies, including the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Courses explore the innovative, complex, and distinctively African American social structures and cultural traditions that Africans in the diaspora have created. Students are exposed to the historical, cultural, political, economic, and social development of people of African descent. Emphasizing a diasporic framework of analysis, the department demands that students acquire both an analytic ability rooted in a traditional discipline and interdisciplinary skills of investigation and research. Learn more at http://www.yale.edu/afamstudies

The purpose of this course is to examine the African American experience in the United States from 1863 to the present. Prominent themes include the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction; African Americans’ urbanization experiences; the development of the modern civil rights movement and its aftermath; and the thought and leadership of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.

Warning: Some of the lectures in this course contain graphic content and/or adult language that some users may find disturbing.